 My name is Sam Vaknin. I'm the author of Malignant Self-Love, Narcissism Revisited. I'm a professor of psychology in several universities on several continents. Today we are going to discuss the thawing issue of who exactly is a narcissist. If you have narcissistic traits, if you display narcissistic behaviors, that doesn't make you a narcissist. We will go into it in great depth a bit later, aided by giants like Theodore Millen and others. But suffice it to say at this stage that narcissistic personality disorder is a clinical entity. It is a disease. It is a condition and it is rare. We don't know exactly how many people should be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder because narcissists don't present themselves willingly to therapy. Only when they are coerced in the prison system by their own mates and spouses, having endured some enormous loss within a life crisis. Only then they gravitate to therapy and even then they just want their lives restored. They don't want to be treated. They don't consider themselves sick, or problematic in any way. So we don't know exactly how many people with narcissistic personality disorder there are. But our best estimates are that something like 1 to 3 percent of the population suffer from narcissistic and antisocial personality disorders combined. So when you throw around the word narcissists to describe every a-hole and every jerk and everyone, you know, every neighbor who had a fight with you over his dog and every boss who criticizes your work and every person you disagree with and so on, that's not good clinical practice. It's also not true. Many more people have what Millen called narcissistic style or narcissistic personality that does not make them narcissists. Now I have a database 1,803 strong. These are people who had provided me with proof that they had been diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder and I've amassed this database over a period of 25 years. Imagine how rare NPD is. One interesting trend within this database. When I opened, when I started the database, between 1997 and 2001, there were only 19 women. Today, there are 386 women in the database. The diagnostic and statistical manual at the time, 20, 25 years ago, had suggested that 75 percent of all narcissists are men. Theo de Millen himself in his seminal book, Personality Disorders in Daily Life also says that the majority of narcissists are men. But I think these ideas should be massively revised. I think based on anecdotal evidence, there are no studies to substantiate this. But I think and many, many other therapies and many, many other psychologists and most of my colleagues, those I'm regularly in touch with, in conferences and so on, we all think that right now it's 50-50. Half of all narcissists are now female. Moreover, many of us are spotting a very, very dangerous and frightening trend. When women become narcissists, their grandiosity is manifested not only via narcissism, but via borderline traits. In other words, while some men, while some men are only narcissists, women are rarely only narcissists. Women tend to be narcissists plus men tend to be narcissists. So a big chunk of women diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorders actually also borderline. Their grandiosity is supported. There are two pillars of grandiosity, their narcissism and their borderline traits. And we know today we are reconceiving of borderline as a form of psychopathy, secondary psychopathy. So these women would display traits and behaviors, especially under stress, especially when they are anxious, especially when they anticipate hurt and pain and rejection and humiliation. These women would be a lot more psychopathic than men. They would become defined, impulsive, reckless, callous, cruel and sadistic, goal-oriented, etc. Narcissistic men would react in a certain way. They would be contemptuous, they would be grandiose, they would be clownish and buffoonish, to be honest. Women would be dangerous. So this is an exceedingly frightening trend. We also see a massive rise by some estimates, a five-fold rise in the number of properly diagnosed, primary psychopathic women. As women assume male, traditional, male gender roles, as women become men, as the world is becoming unigender, as the distinction between men and women crumble, distinctions crumble in a variety of ways. Women are becoming men. But regrettably, they are becoming psychopathic men. Psychopathic men. This is, to my mind, the most frightening development ever. I mean, all we need is a society comprised of narcissistic men and psychopathic women. We are really doomed as a species. Should this happen? And I think, I think the pandemic is going to accelerate these trends. I think the pandemic is putting inexorable, intolerable pressure on both men and women. Isolation, distancing, loss of sources of narcissistic supply, loss of human contact, which somehow regulates and calibrates behavior, social control, peer control, all these are lost. And I think we're going to see three waves of mental illness following this pandemic. And they are going to be ginormous, ginormous waves. We are talking half the population, if not more. Depression and anxiety, mood disorders and anxiety disorders, followed by personality disorders, and followed by a serious upsurge in psychotic disorders. We are not prepared for this. No way. Our mental health system is geared to cope with severe mental illness in about one percent of our population. We are already seeing in some countries like the United States, the number is closer to 40 percent. I mean, this will dwarf COVID-19. This threatens the foundations of our civilization. Absolutely. So today's topic is very crucial. How do we tell apart people who constitute a real menace, a real threat? People who are dangerous and risky should be avoided. In other words, real purebred, echt narcissists. How do we distinguish them? From people who are merely misanthropic, entitled, a-holes, jerks, lacking in social skills, autistic. How do we tell these two groups apart? And so, I would like first to read to you two bits of literature. Each one describing a different type of narcissism. The first one was provided courtesy of Lisa Marie Raus via Instagram, which sometimes is a useful tool. And she sent me this about Nebue-Kadnazer. Nebue-Kadnazer in English, the proper pronunciation is Nebuchadnaze in Hebrew or Babylonian. Okay, here's the here's the excerpt. Except gods whose dwelling place is not with mortal flesh. Someone said to Nebue-Kadnazer that he's not God. He considered himself God. And because of this, Daniel, this is from the book of Daniel, chapter 2. So someone said to him, God, the dwelling place of God is not in mortal flesh. You're not a God. Because of this, the king became indignant, very furious, and gave orders to destroy all the wise men of Babylon. Daniel chapter 2. Later, Nebue-Kadnazer set up a 90-foot statue to himself and required everyone in his kingdom to bow to it. The righteous Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refused. Nebue-Kadnazer responded in rage and anger. Daniel chapter 4. And arrogantly said, what God is there who can deliver you out of my hands? Daniel chapter 4. When the three righteous Jews, of course there were Jews, when the three righteous Jews continued to refuse, Nebue-Kadnazer was filled with wrath to the point that his facial expression was altered. However, despite his high position and insolent pride, God was able to humble King Nebue-Kadnazer. And Daniel told the story to Nebue-Kadnazer's grandson, Belchazar. O King, the Most High God granted sovereignty, grandeur, glory, and majesty. Here's one type of malignant narcissist. It's a grandiose narcissist. We have many politicians today throughout the world, from the United States to Hungary to Russia to Turkey, all over the world. These type of politicians are in ascendance. Philippines, Brazil, they're in ascendance and they took over. They took over the political class and the political system in the majority of the world. So this is the Nebue-Kadnazer type. Now I'm going to read to you another segment, another piece of literature, and it describes a collapsed narcissist. But a collapsed narcissist whose grandiosity was not the main feature. Have a listen. It is from the book Shopping, Seduction, and Mr. Selfridge by Lindy Woodhead. And it's a painful excerpt. By 1941, Harry Selfridge, the guy who established Selfridge's store at the heart of London, anyone who has ever been to London, you know, one of our first stops, if not the first stop, is Selfridge's. By 1941, Harry Selfridge, once the wealthy and proud head of his namesake retailing empire, had lost his fortune and was ousted by his own investors. He became increasingly destitute, but clung to his memories of grandeur, and continued to visit the store, unrecognized. On one occasion, he was even arrested for vagrancy. Surprising as it may seem, the book says, Selfridge's, Harry Selfridge, still went into the store on most days, taking the lift once exclusively reserved for him, but now designated for all directors. Stubbornly sitting in his office, where he and Miss Mappam went through a ritual of let's pretend. They both pretended that there were letters, that there were memos, that there were invitations or meetings. In reality, there were none. Harry Selfridge would still don his top hat and walk the store, where staff, though pleased to see him, were also embarrassed. They didn't know what to say. What could they say? He was said to be making plans. Why? No one could really fathom, but word went out that he had dreams of starting a new enterprise, and Mr. Holmes struck again with a letter. He sent the letter to Selfridge's. And the letter said, it was clearly the intention of a director's, and especially in the minds of their advisors, that for practical and psychological reasons, you would vacate the managing director's accommodation, so as to give complete freedom to the new managers. I'm instructed by the board to ask you to be good enough to arrange for such personal possessions as you would wish to be removed before the 26th of April. One other matter with which the directors view with some concern is that you are contemplating commencing independent business activities. They do object and deprecate very seriously that such negotiations should be conducted from the store address. And in case Selfridge didn't get the point, he was given the use of a small office. In Keysine House, a company property across the road, his pension was cut by a third, and the services of Miss Mappham were withdrawn. Harry Selfridge continued to spend several hours a day sitting alone in his empty room on the opposite side of the street, writing letters to various acquaintances in authority, offering his services for the war effort, and hoping in vain that he might be given some useful work. Eventually he stopped coming to the office. In January 1941, just a few days before his 85th birthday, the board stripped Harry Selfridge of his title of president, and with year-end net profits at an all-time low, the board slashed his pension yet again. Now living on a bigger 2,000 pounds a year, Harry surged and rosely vacated Brookhouse and moved to a two-bedroom flat in Rosscourt, Putney. In June of that year, isolated and alone in Hollywood, his former long-time mistress, Jenny Dolly, committed suicide, hanging herself with a sash of her dressing gown. Harry Selfridge was increasingly frail and would sit by the fire in Rosscourt, shuffling papers and burning his private letters, while rosely looked on in despair. On some days he would stand at his local bus stop on Putney High Street, his roomy blue eyes searching the road for the arrival of a number 22. Virtually deaf, his mind rambling, he hardly spoke. Harry Gordon Selfridge had retreated into his own private world, full of memories no one could share. Still wearing curiously old-fashioned formal, shabby gentile clothes, his patent leather boots cracked and downed hill, his untidy white hair falling over a frayed shirt collar, his by now battered trilby pulled low. He moved stiffly, aided by a Malacca cane. On the bus he would carefully count out the pennies for his fare, buying a ticket to Hyde Park Corner, where he got off to wait for a number 137 bus, quietly telling the conductor, Selfridge's please. Seemingly lost in memories of past glories and recognized by anybody, the old men shuffled the length of the majestic building before crossing the road to the corner of Duke Street, facing Selfridges. Stopping there, leaning heavily on his cane, Harry Selfridge would look up at the roof of the store that he had built, and along to the far right upper corner window, as though searching for something that used to be his office. Miss Mappham met him one day when he was suffering from a virulent attack of shingles and was in great pain. She fled back to her office, so distressed that she wept. Sometimes when he was standing on the street, a hurrying pedestrian would bump into him. Once he fell heavily on one pitiful occasion, the police arrested him, suspecting that he was a vagrant. Two brief comments, just to let you digest this this horrible story of decay and decomposition and disintegration and decompensation and everything that happens to every narcissist at the end of life. It's happening to me right now. So to let you digest this to one point of order and one recommendation, if you look at my at any YouTube channel, there's an upper navigation bar which says videos, community, I don't know what about and so on. Right next to the about in the navigation bar, there's a sign of a magnifying glass. That magnifying glass is a search box. Use the search box before you ask me questions. If you refuse to search the channel and ask me questions, I'm going to respond rudely and then I'm going to delete your comment. Not doing your homework, not doing your research and wasting my limited time is abusive. It's entitled. This is what narcissists do. They think they deserve everything. They think they deserve to be spoon-fed. You don't deserve to be spoon-fed. You have to work. You have to work hard. And then as a last resort, if you utterly fail, I'm at your disposal to help as much as I can. But I have to be convinced and sure and see signs that you have tried your best. Magnifying glass next to the about section, search. A recommendation. There was a painter, an American painter, Edward Hopper. He had a series of paintings about discontented couples at the end of their relationships. Disintegrate, disintegrating, intimacy, disintegrating, couplehood, diets, and so on. There are good reasons to think that there are signs of narcissism in one of the members of the couple, usually the man. I refer you to three paintings. Summer Twilight, Cape Cod Evening, and Summer Evening. Have a look at these three paintings. There's a man and woman. They're fighting. They're ignoring each other. They're hurting each other. There's even a dog. And it's a depiction of what happens to people when they fail to maintain intimacy because of insensitivity, because of lack of empathy, because of disregard for the other. Okay. Many people asked me, I mean, they got totally confused between grooming and love-pumping and shared fantasy and stalking. I mean, it wasn't meant to be a word salad, but in some people's mind it had created the equivalent of a word salad. So I'm going to give it to you again. I'm going to give it to you very briefly, very succinctly, very clearly, I hope. With non-intimate partners, the narcissist is transactional. He is exploitative. He wants to take, and he's very short-term. He has no view of the future. He wants to obtain supply. He wants to get money. He wants to secure sex. There's no commitment, no investment. And the narcissist moves on having secured, having obtained what he wanted. He's itinerant, and he is desultory. Okay. That's with non-intimate partners. With intimate partners, there's a sequence of steps. Step number one, grooming and love-pumping. This step includes lies, false promises. During this step, the narcissist acts as a guru-father, combination guru and strict disciplinarian, harsh, stern, but loving and just father. Usually it works with women who have daddy issues and also with borderlines for dependents and so on. Then having captured, captivated, acquired the intimate partner, the narcissist moves on and takes both of them himself and the newly acquired, the new acquisition takes both of them into the next phase. The next phase is the shared fantasy. The guru-father vanishes in the shared fantasy and instead is replaced by a child. It could be a genius child. It could be an adorable child. It could be a cute child. It could be all three, like me. So there's a child suddenly. The partner is utterly disoriented. She had contracted to enter the shared fantasy with a guru-father and here she finds herself burdened with a child and forced to become a mother, a maternal figure, a good enough mother, forced to compensate for the wrongs inflicted upon the narcissist in early childhood by his real mother, forced to replay the conflicts that he had had with his mother. The narcissist starts immediately within the shared fantasy to abuse his new intimate partner and the abuse has two reasons, two purposes, two goals. One, to test the parental capacities of the counterparty. Can she be a good enough mother? Will she accept me unconditionally? Never mind what I do. Never mind how much I abuse her. And the second reason is to reenact early childhood conflicts and traumas, to replay them hopefully with a different, much better resolution. Subjected to this narcissistic abuse type one, women choose one of two solutions. Either they cheat discreetly but withdraw from the partnership or they don't cheat but still withdraw from the partnership. They absent themselves physically or they become very busy or they absent themselves emotionally. The narcissist notices this and he becomes an erotomanic stalker. As his intimate partner avoids him, he approaches her but he approaches her again as the genius child or the child, he's still a child. And the second solution women adopt is to bargain. So some of them withdraw. A minority also cheat. And some of them bargain. They try to bring back the father figure, the guru figure or convince the narcissist to grow up, stop being a child and becoming an adult with chores, responsibilities, commitment and investment, commensurate with his age. They pose demands. That's why it's called the bargaining phase. And this provokes yet more narcissistic abuse, but it's a different type of abuse. I call it narcissistic abuse type two. And while type one was meant to test the partner, type two is meant to get rid of the partner, to jettison the partner. It is at this stage that the narcissist again becomes the guru father. The child suddenly vanishes and instead there is this harsh, strict, stern, cruel, uncompromising, unrelenting abuser, father figure, but a vicious, wicked, non-benevolent, malicious even malevolent father. So their approach, the women approach in order to bargain, in order to restructure the couple. They sometimes suggest couple therapy. A daring minority suggests to spice up the sex life with group sex or three cells. They try everything. And the narcissist reacts badly because he feels pressured. He feels suffocated. He feels imposed upon. He feels that his freedom is being taken. He becomes a guru father. They approach, the narcissist avoids. So both stalking and bargaining, both withdrawing and bargaining lead nowhere. Withdrawing leads to insufferable, intolerable stalking and bargaining leads to breakup. So both these drive women to simply disconnect, to detach. Many of them now at this stage cheat and betray the narcissist. Some of them do it ostentatiously so as to force the narcissist to abandon them, to force the narcissist to do the breakup. They don't have, I mean, these women don't have the capacity, the mental capacity to break up. They don't have the strength, the courage, they pity the narcissist. There's a whole range of mixed emotions, mixed beg of emotions. And they want the narcissist to take initiative and initiate the breakup. So cheating becomes much more common at this stage. And it's very often ostentatious in order to force the narcissist's hand. And if he doesn't, if he remains, if he stalks even further and so on, then they abandon the narcissist. At this stage, the narcissist is modified. And there's external modification and internal modification. Initially, he's modified internally. He says to himself, something's wrong with me. It is women number 26 who had abandoned me this way. All my women cheated on me. It's horrible. But then he immediately compensates by reframing the modification and converting it from internal to external. Women are bad, women are evil, women are sluts, women are vicious. This is what women do. I knew it. I knew it's going to happen. I shouldn't be with women, etc. So this is external modification. And he vacillates. He vacillates because sometimes he recalls the shared fantasy. The shared fantasy was good, pleasant, ego-syntonic. He liked it. He was comfortable in it. He wanted it to continue. And he feels wronged. He feels that women who had exited the shared fantasy had betrayed him. And the bargaining phase, he wanted the women gun, the woman gun. And so he realizes that he had pushed her away. So then he has internal modification. External, internal, external, external, until he forgets, I mean, he suppresses the whole thing and moves on to the next victim, the next intimate partner. Okay. Now to the main topic of the video. Who is a narcissist? Who has narcissistic personality disorder? And who is merely narcissistic? Pathological narcissism is a spectrum of traits, personality styles. And at the extreme end, there is narcissistic personality disorder. But it's an end. It's a tiny percentage. Historically, people had observed the difference between narcissists and sick, sick narcissists, between near, near arrogant, selfish, self-centered, disembathic people, and people with a disease, a disorder, a mental illness. And for example, consider Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher and a proto-sociologist in the 18th century. Jean-Jacques Rousseau suggested a distinction between amour propre and amour de soi. Amour propre in French is simply self-love. It means when you love yourself. And Jean-Jacques Rousseau says to love yourself, to have self-esteem, to have self-confidence, you need other people. You need other people to help you regulate your internal environment. So Jean-Jacques Rousseau introduced the concept of narcissism or at the very least the concept of narcissistic supply without calling it narcissistic supply. And he said amour propre relies on other people for the regulation of one's self-esteem, self-confidence, self-worth, self-image even, the way one sees himself, but one's capacity to love himself. And Rousseau contrasted amour propre with amour de soi. Amour de soi is also loving yourself, but it doesn't involve seeing yourself as others see you. So amour de soi is what we call today healthy self-love. And it relies, by the way, on healthy narcissism. And amour propre is what we call today narcissism, pathological narcissism. And it also relies on narcissism, but on the sick version of narcissism. And according to Rousseau, amour de soi is more primitive. It leads to wholeness. It leads to happiness because it's more basic. It's more foundational. It's really us. Amour propre, said Rousseau, is unnatural. It arises only within society. It's because individuals constantly compare themselves with one another. Rousseau said that amour propre is corrupt, and it leads to vice, sin, and misery. He was very, very advanced in his thinking about narcissism, by the way. If you just change the words in his texts, his texts still read a very, very good description of narcissism. The term amour propre predates Rousseau. Your Blaise Pascalius did, La Rue Chocot, Pierre Nicole, Jacques Abadieu, many others use the term amour propre. It was in the air. Rousseau plucked it from other writing. But none of them made the distinction between narcissism, which is the sick, corrupt way of loving yourself via the gaze of others, and amour de soi, proper self-love, which is healthy, happy, whole, and basic, foundational. So consequently, the other thinkers, like Pascal, they confuse these two. Pascal, for example, said all self-love, self-esteem, ego, vanity, they are all the same. So you should never love yourself. You should never have self-esteem. You should suppress your ego, ego death. You should never be vain. So he made a mess. He confused narcissism, self-love, with love of God. He said, you know what? You should vanish, Pascal said, Blaise Pascal. You should vanish. You should love only God. He said, it's unfair that we are born with a desire to be loved by others. But he said, it's because of the fall in the Garden of Eden, the original sin. The original sin, he said, gave rise to narcissism. The original sin forced us, because we would not be loved anymore by God, forced us to be loved by men, forced us to revert to men rather than to God, because God had cast us. God had discarded us. God idealized us, then devalued us, then discarded us. Very narcissistic of him, yeah, and so then we were left to refer to other, to others like us. We were left to cheat on God with others. Christianity was the remedy to this wretched state of men known as amour pauper. Okay, many people ask me, isn't your definition of malignant narcissism too white? First of all, I did not invent malignant narcissism. The phrase and the diagnosis and the clinical description belong to Kernberg, not to Wagner. Having read it, people say, I think that it fits my neighbors, my friends, my family. Everyone seems to be a now. Not true. All of us have narcissistic traits. Some of us even develop a narcissistic personality or a narcissistic style. Moreover, narcissism is a spectrum of behaviors, from healthy behaviors to utterly pathological behaviors, from lesser behaviors to greater behaviors, to greatest behaviors known as narcissistic personality disorder, to the ultimate malignant or psychopathic narcissism. Healthy narcissism. By the way, I'm reading to you a text that I had offered in the year 2000, precisely 20 years ago. This text is dated August 2000. And in this text, I suggested that there are three types of narcissists, lesser narcissists, greater narcissists, and greatest narcissists. And it had been adopted by some people. Healthy narcissism develops in infancy and is the indispensable foundation of one's sense of self-worth, self-esteem, self-confidence. It is a form of private language with a narrative aimed at an internal audience of one. Healthy narcissism is, therefore, an organizational and hermeneutic interpretative principle of the personality. It's the cornerstone on which we build self-esteem, self-confidence. It's healthy. It's good. It drives us out into the world. It has grandiose elements, but the kind of grandiose elements that allow us to take measured, analyzed, reasonable risks in exploring the world. Healthy narcissism is an antidote to a constricted life. Pathological narcissism is a private religion with the false self as the Godhead and the true self as the sacrificial lamb. The single worshiper in this faith is the narcissist. The audience is external and its feedback is used to regulate the narcissist's sense of self-worth and fulfill his ego functions. Both forms of narcissism require creative acts and creativity in both maintenance and exegesis. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Edition 4 Text Revision uses this language to describe the malignant narcissism, an all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity in fantasy or in behavior, need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy usually beginning by early adulthood, important. You can't really diagnose NPD in adolescence, let alone in children, beginning by early adulthood and present in various contexts. So what matters are these characteristics. You find them in healthy people, but in healthy people you find only some of them and they never feed on each other. In sick people, in people diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder, these characteristics appear jointly, not separately, not intermittently and they are all pervasive. They invade like cancer, like metastatic cancer. They penetrate, they mold, affect every aspect, every nook, every cranny of the personality. And I would say that these, the following six parameters are crucial. If they are absent jointly, not separately, jointly, all of them, they absent, that's not a narcissist, that's a narcissistic person. So these are the six that grandiose fantasies are abundantly discernible, that grandiose often ridiculous behaviors present, that there is an overriding need for admiration or adulation or attention narcissistic supply, that the person lacks empathy, regards other people as two-dimensional cartoon figures and obstructions unable to stand in other people's shoes, that these traits and behaviors begin at the latest in early adulthood, that the narcissistic behaviors pervade all the social and emotional interactions of the narcissist. If you see all these in a single individual, that's someone who has narcissism, pathological narcissism, narcissistic personality disorder. If you just see someone with vein, being glorious, who is arrogant and haughty, who is disempathic, who hates people, who is schizoid, that's not a narcissist. He may be narcissistic, but narcissism is a clinical entity. It's like not everyone who coughs has COVID or tuberculosis. Coughing of course is a symptom of COVID and tuberculosis, but you need many others and you need all of them to appear together. So I want to read to you something Theodore Millen had written. This is the book. I hope I'm getting it right. I don't know where the camera is, I swear to you. I hope I'm getting it right. It's the book. It's called Personality Disorders in Modern Life by Theodore Millen and Roger Davis. This is the number one, two and three book about personality disorders. You buy this book, you don't need any other, trust me, including mine. It's a wonderful book, absolutely wonderful. And I want to read to you page 275 something that Millen had written about the distinction between jerks, a-holes, insufferable people, you know, disgusting people, repulsive people, abhorrent people, annoying people, irritating people, and narcissists. Narcissism is a really pernicious, dangerous mental illness. And he writes, several normal range variants of the narcissistic style have been proposed, each built around some slightly different aspect of the total pattern. Because our society often values narcissistic traits, and he quotes Lash from 1978, Christopher Lash, because our society often values narcissistic traits, many readers will find aspects of themselves in these brief portraits. Individuals with self-confidence style, and he refers to a study by Oldham and Morris in 1995. So individuals with a self-confidence style have a strong faith in themselves, believing they are special, exceptional, or even destined to great things. Many have a powerful vision of themselves as hero, conqueror, or expert. Most often they are frank about their ambition to realize their goals. Often their enthusiasm and natural leadership create an aura that makes it easy to recruit others to their purpose. Most of them aim high and enjoy the battle to succeed. They enjoy the vision of being on top of their game at the top of their field of profession, though they are not above and being others who may be more accomplished. Ever aware of their strengths, their equanimity is untouched by self-doubt. They expect others to acknowledge their specialness and treat them with respect, if not admiration. Sometimes they may show their temper when they are crossed or slighted. You've heard of this? That's not a narcissism. That's a self-confident type. Even this is not a narcissism. He continues. The asserting pattern is a pattern that Milan himself first described in 1994. The asserting pattern is similar, but more strongly competitive and self-assured. Such individuals exhibit a sense of boldness that stems from an unwavering belief in their own talent or intelligence. Ever ambitious, they naturally assume the role of leader, act decisively, and expect others to recognize and to defer to their superior abilities. Beyond mere self-confidence, they are audacious, clever, and persuasive, charming others to their cause. At times, however, their self-regard may create a sense of entitlement, the feeling that they are special and are therefore entitled to special treatment beyond what is merited by their role or by the conventional social courtesies. And even that is not a narcissism. That's an assertive type, assertive pattern. The normal range, Milan continues. The normal range narcissistic style, narcissistic style, not pathology. The normal range narcissistic style can also be portrayed by examining normal variants of the pathological traits found in the DSM. Spare edities in 1995, they compared the pathologies described in the DSM with the normal variants of these pathologies, how they appear in normal people. Spare ed, S-P-E-R-R-Y, 1995. Milan continues. The narcissistic personality exhibits a grandiose sense of self-regard, expecting their superior talent, ability, and intelligence to be recognized even in the absence of commensurate performance, which is criteria N1 into DSM4. In contrast, the narcissistic style has a healthy sense of self-esteem based on genuine achievements, but one that puts estimates of ability at the upper end of what is realistic. Whereas the disordered individual is preoccupied with fantasies of almost infinite success, power, brilliance, beauty, or accomplishment, which is criteria N2. Those with narcissistic style project confidence rather than omnipotence and have more well-formed plans concerning how their goals can be achieved. Whereas the disordered feels a sense of specialness and affiliates only with others who are likewise special, criteria N3, the style, the narcissistic style simply prefers the company of talented others without feeling a strong content for individuals not similarly gifted. Whereas the disordered actively requires admiration and seeks to evoke displays of admiration from other people, criteria N4, the style gracefully accepts compliments and praise without excessive ego inflation. So he makes a very clear distinction between narcissistic style and narcissistic disorder. Now there are two competing variations of narcissistic personality disorder within the DSM. The DSM has multiple personality. There is a list of criteria borrowed verbatim verbating from the DSM4 copied copy-paste from the DSM4. These are the famous nine criteria, but hidden somewhere at the very back of the book there is a daring courageous and utterly updated alternate model of narcissistic personality disorder. Let's start with the DSM4. DSM4 specifies nine diagnostic criteria. For to diagnose narcissistic personality disorder, someone must meet five of these criteria. Of course you realize how to put it gently, intellectually challenge disease, because two people can come to the diagnostician, two people. One of them would meet criteria one to five. One of them would satisfy criteria one, two, three, four, five. The other one would satisfy criteria five, six, seven, eight, nine. Both of them would be diagnosed with narcissistic personality disorder. And the only thing they have in common is criteria five. This is called the polythetic problem. This creates a lot of comorbidity and many other problems in diagnosis. So the DSM4 list of criteria of NPD sucks, sucks because it's taxonomic, it's categorical, it's descriptive, but it doesn't capture the essence. And it allows for people who have nothing in common to be diagnosed with the same personality disorder, clinical entity, which is unthinkable in another discipline like medicine. During the years between the publication of the DSM4 and the publication of the DSM5 in 2013, I had proposed to amend the criteria, the diagnostic criteria of narcissistic personality disorder. And my amended criteria were downloaded 10 million times. So I suspect they've had some effect on the committee of the diagnostic and statistical manual, but I don't claim any credit. So I want to read to you the criteria, not as they appear in the DSM4, but as I've amended them. Number one, feels grandiose and self-important, exaggerates accomplishments, talents, skills, contacts, and personality traits to the point of line. Demands to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements. Number two, is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, fearsome power or omnipotence, unequal brilliance in the case of the cerebral narcissist, bodily beauty or sexual performance in the case of the somatic narcissist, or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion. Number four, I think, yeah? Number four, firmly convinced that he or she is unique and being special can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associated with, other special or unique or high status people or institutions. Number five, requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation, or feeling that, I'm sorry, wishes to be feared and to be notorious and envied. This is called narcissistic supply. Next, feels entitled, demands automatic and full compliance with his or her unreasonable expectations for special and favorable priority treatment. Next, is interpersonally exploitative, in other words, uses other people to achieve his or her own ends. That's more of an antisocial thing, by the way. This is the bridge between narcissism and psychopathy. Next, devoid of empathy, is unable or unwilling to identify with, acknowledge or accept, the feelings, needs, preferences, priorities and choices of others. And next, constantly envious of others and seeks to hurt or destroy the object of his or her frustration. Suffers from persecutor, paranoid delusions, as he or she believes that they feel the same about him or her, believes that other people feel the same, they're envious and they are likely to act in the same vein or manner. Finally, behaves arrogantly and hortily, feels superior, omnipotent, omniscient, invincible, immune, above the law, omnipresent, magical thinking. Rages when frustrated, contradicted or confronted by people, he or she considers inferior to him or her and unworthy, especially when his grandiosity is challenged. So this is a set of amended criteria. I now will go to my website and I want to quote to you the alternate model, which is, as I said, far superior. It incorporates many, many insights that I had been suggesting over 20 years, but I have no idea if the committee had been influenced by my work or not. Maybe it was a process of discovery. I mean discoveries spring up simultaneously in many places. So I'm not claiming that I had influenced the language in the alternate model of the fifth edition of the DSM. I'm just saying we agree. I agree with the alternate model in large part. The DSM5 redefines personality disorders this way. The essential features of a personality disorder are impairments in personality, self and interpersonal, functioning in the presence of pathological personality traits. According to the alternative DSM5 model for personality disorders on page 767, the following criteria must be met in order to diagnose narcissistic personality disorders. So it starts like this, moderate or greater impairment in personality function in either identity or self-direction, in my view, both. Identity. The narcissist keeps referring to others excessively in order to regulate his self-esteem. I think it should be sense of self-worth. And he refers to others for self-definition to define his identity. The narcissist self-appraisal is exaggerated, whether it is inflated, deflated, there's a recognition of compensatory narcissism, whether it's inflated, deflated, or fluctuating between these two poles. And his emotional regulation reflects these vacillations. It's revolutionary text, revolutionary, because it recognizes the affinity and the interface between borderline and narcissism, which Grotstein had suggested many years ago. He said that borderlines are failed narcissists. Both narcissists and borderlines now, according to the alternate model, both of them have emotional dysregulation. And finally, the DSM-5 had accepted what I've been saying for decades, that narcissists can have an inferiority complex and feel worthless and bad, that they go through cycles of ups and downs in their self-evaluation, that this cycling influences their mood and effect. Okay, continue with the text. DSM-5. Self-direction. The narcissist sets goals in order to gain approval from others. This is what I call narcissistic supply. The DSM-5 ignores the fact that the narcissist finds disapproval, equally rewarding as long as it places him firmly as a central attention in the limelight. The DSM-5 continues. The narcissist lacks self-awareness as far as his motivation goes. I would add, as far as almost everything else. The narcissist's personal standards and benchmarks are either too high, which supports his grandiosity, or too low, which buttresses his sense of entitlement, which is incommensurate with his real life performance. So when the narcissist has very low standards, yes, when his benchmarks are low, anything he does is a major accomplishment. If you expect two and you accomplish four, you feel like a genius. You feel like a giant. But of course, if you expect ten and you accomplish eight, you feel like a failure. So some narcissists expect ten and some narcissists expect two. This is also a revolutionary view of narcissism in the DSM-5. DSM-5 continues. Impairments in interpersonal functioning in either empathy or intimacy. I think it's wrong. It's in both. Empathy. I'm continuing to read from the manual. Empathy. The narcissist finds it difficult to identify with the emotions and needs of other people, but is very attuned to their reactions when they are relevant to himself. This is called empathy. Consequently, the narcissist overestimates the effect he has on others or underestimates the effect he has on others. The classic narcissist, the overt narcissist, I want to add, the overt narcissist never underestimates the effect that he has on other people. But some types of narcissists, for example, the covert narcissist, the inverted narcissist, they do underestimate the effect they have on other people. And that's why they're always shocked. They're always shocked when they're blamed and accused and they never feel guilty or ashamed because they don't think they did anything wrong. They don't think whatever they had done should have had any effect. They think other people are hypersensitive, hypervigilant, nuts. Continuing from the manual. Intimacy. The narcissist's relationships are self-serving and therefore shallow and superficial. They are centered around and geared at the regulation of his self-esteem. My interpretation is in order to obtain narcissistic supply for the regulation of his labile sense of self-worth. There's no ability there. The manual. The narcissist is not genuinely interested in his intimate partner's experience. In other words, the manual says that the narcissist does fake such interest, convincingly, but is not really interested. The manual. The narcissist emphasizes his need for personal gain. By using the word need, the DSM-5 acknowledges the compulsive and addictive nature of narcissistic supply. It's a need, not a choice. The DSM. These twin fixtures of the narcissist's relationships render them one-sided. There's no mutuality, no reciprocity, no intimacy. And then the manual continues to pathological personality traits. Antagonism characterized by grandiosity and attention-seeking. Grandiosity. The aforementioned feeling of entitlement. The DSM-5 adds that grandiosity can be either overt or covert, which responds to my taxonomy and to the taxonomy of Akhtar and Cooper. Grandiosity is characterized by self-centeredness, a firmly held conviction of superiority, arrogance, or haughtiness, and condescending or patronizing attitude. That's the DSM, not me. Continuing with the DSM. Attention-seeking. The narcissist puts in ordinate effort, time, and resources into attracting other people, sources of narcissistic supply, and placing himself at the focus and center of attention. The narcissist seeks admiration. The DSM gets this completely wrong. The narcissist does prefer to be admired and adduated. But if he fails in obtaining positive supply, if he fails in obtaining adulation, admiration, or laws of affirmation, any kind of attention would do. Even if it's negative attention, being feared, being envied, being hated, it's okay. It's good enough just not to be ignored. And the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-5, and with disclaimers, differential diagnosis, and so on. And the DSM-5 makes clear. The above-mentioned impairments, the above-mentioned problems, should be, quote, stable across time and consistent across situations, not better understood as normative for the individual's developmental stage or sociocultural environment, not solely due to the direct physiological effects of a substance, drug abuse, medication, I would add, alcohol, or a general medical condition such as severe head trauma. Alcohol, for example, there's something called alcohol myopia, which is essentially grandiosity induced by alcohol. All alcoholics when they're drunk are narcissists, situational narcissists, temporary narcissists. Okay, that's the DSM-5. Remember Nebuchadnezzar? Nebuchadnezzar, with whom we started, when he got very pissed off and people told him you're not a god, and it's only he killed everyone. He didn't want to hear it, so he killed everyone. I sympathize with him, believe me. There's a difference between narcissism and cultural or period-specific attitudes. At the time of Nebuchadnezzar, and much later, the kings and emperors were gods. Augustus in Imperial Rome, Alexander the Great in the Macedonian Empire, Henry VIII in Britain, in England. Kings considered themselves gods. They erected statues, statues to themselves, while alive very often. There was idolatry of kings. They were even the more modest ones, the more humble ones. They claimed clearly that they were ruling by divine grace. Alexander, for example, cast him, Alexander the Great, cast himself as a descendant of Achilles. He believed that his final victory over King Darius III, the Persian king, was his destiny. He died in 323 BC, and he was convinced that King Philip, his biological father, was not his real father, but that he was the son of the omnipotent Greek, God Zeus. Alexander the Great was not, I mean, it's anachronistic to say that he was a narcissist, because every king and emperor, for well over 2,000 years, said the same. I'm God, I'm communing with God, I'm ruling by divine grace, I'm God's representative on earth. The Pope still says this. Although, so Alexander the Great was not the first human to receive divine honors and not the first king to self-deify. Roman emperors, the Lannister kings, did it a lot, and the self-deification was rational. It offered political advantages that an ancient ruler could leverage and use. And so, when he came to Egypt, Alexander sacrificed an apis bull, a bull, kind of special bull, and when he sacrificed him, he received the title of Beloved by Amun, chosen by Ra, the sun god. The son of Ra or Amun is also the son of Zeus. This Ra was Egypt's supreme god, as Zeus was the main Olympic god. Son of Helios, this Ra was solidating. So Alexander didn't declare himself a god or the son of god, by the way, the son of god, rings a bell, yeah, Jesus. He did declare himself the son of god because he did this in order to secure the loyalty and allegiance of conquered territories and their populations. He claimed to descend from Zeus through his son Heracles. And so the title, son of Zeus, was immediately accepted by the way. The Greeks didn't think that he was a narcissist, or that he was vain, or that he was insane. It was well embedded in the social cultural context. That's what the DSM-5 tells you to do, look at society, look at culture. Massesism is culture dependent, culture bound. Alexander was in the western desert and the priest of the Oracle of Amun in Siwa, again saluted him as a son of god. That was his new title. And when he crossed back, when he sent some of his army back to Greece, this army brought with it the news that he was a son of god. So the Oracle of Didima also has spoken and announced that Alexander was a son of Zeus. These were all political acts. And when Hitler declared that he is the reification of history, of German history, there was also a political act. I mean, these are all political acts. And you can be cynical about it, of course. You can say, well, the guy was an odd case, you know, no mere mortal can have divine fathers, really, and you believe in Jesus, don't you? So these titles inspired men. And the more nationalities he had in his army, the more he proliferated himself as god or son of god. And it's the same in the Roman emperor. A deceased emperor could become a divus, could attain state divinity. The Senate voted on an act known as apotheosis. Apotheosis means to convert a mortal emperor into a deity, elevating into the rank of the gods. When apotheosis was granted, it had religious, political and moral implications. It was a judgment on the imperial ruler, and it allowed living emperors to associate themselves with the lineage of gods. Because if your father was a god, was just announced, just converted to a god. If your father was an emperor and he became a god, then you're the son of god. You're the son of, you're the successor and the heir to a line of divi, a line of divinities and gods. It was a useful instrument, for example, the Spacium, when he established a Flavian imperial dynasty after Nero died, and there was a civil war, and Septimus, and I mean it was a bloody mess. When he and some of them were assassinated, like Commodus, when he established an imperial cult, and this cult was indistinguishable from the official deities, like Jupiter and so on. This cult was integrated with the classic traditional gods, and it was thought that the imperial cult guarantees Rome's survival. Emperors like Desius and Diocletian and others, they tried somehow to separate the traditional from the cult of divine emperors, but they failed. It took Christianity and Constantine I and Emperor Julian to somehow, and Theodosius to somehow, you know, fight it off. And this divine lineage continued very late into the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The divine right of kings can be traced back to the medieval period. It embedded and founded and legitimized the monarch and his superiority. The concept of divine right is religious but also political origins, and it states that only God can select a monarch, so if you became a king, it's a divine act. It's a choice of God. Only God could have made you a king, and moreover, only God can judge you because only he is the authority. It's a form of ex-judicial, monarchical government, and you should show allegiance to the crown and to the king because he is chosen by God, he's God's long arm, an extension of God. This theory in Middle Ages was because people felt that kings were somehow supernatural. They were endowed with great power which could have come only from God, and it was their duty to serve God's anointed monarch on earth. And this continued well into the 18th century, believe it or not. Henry VIII was the first to make an ideology out of it. He needed to assert his legitimacy when he separated from the Roman Catholic Church, separating England from Rome. In the 1530s, he had to provide some substitute to the Pope's authority. The Pope is supposedly the successor of Jesus. He is Jesus actually. He's Jesus on earth. He's the temporary embodiment of Jesus. So Henry VIII had to disconnect England from the papacy, and to do that he created the act of submission of the clergy, where essentially he said, I am Jesus on earth. And Queen Elizabeth I also used the divine right of kings because she had legitimate issues with the public, with her own consumers. She felt that her title was a bit dubious. The transition, the succession was a bit dubious. She had to do a few unpleasant things on the way. Let's not get into details. She's a woman after all. We have to be gentlemanly. But she tried to convince everyone very hard that she received the title, it was bestowed on her by God. She felt the need to defend the realm. She was the head of the Church of England, the equivalent of the Pope. And so many people felt she didn't have the right. She was the daughter of Anne Boleyn. And technically she should have been executed for treason at the time. It was very common to kill the traitor and all his family. And so when Mary, Queen of Scots and Duke of Norfolk, they plotted to overthrow her, and she had to do what she had to do. At that time she said, they are wrong. They are rebelling against God. They are heretics. I couldn't have become a queen unless I was divinely ordained, unless God himself had chosen me. James VI of Scotland, later James I of England, he had multiple personality, multiple monarchical personality, also believed in the divine right of kings conveniently. He felt that royal authority influenced informed laws and that the king was superior to his subjects. There was royal superiority, but we won't call him a Nazism. It's not Nazism. It's the ethos of the times. It's the ideology, the religion of the time. And James wrote the Basilicon Doan in 1599 for his son, Prince Henry. And he said in the Basilicon Doan that the king has powers over his subjects. He should not be a tyrant, but he has powers over his subjects, even if he's especially, if he's a good Christian. Because as he said, the king must acknowledge himself ordained for his people having received from the God a burden of government, whereof he must be accountable. And Charles I, who lost his head figuratively and then literally, Charles I was James's son. When his people were not so convinced that he had been chosen by divine right owing to his misbehavior, he disregarded parliament. He said, you are chosen by the people. I'm chosen by God. He removed himself from court life. He said, you're human. I'm superhuman. I'm God. But he didn't do this because he was a grandiose Nazism, as opposed to some occupants of the White House. He did this because he believed that he had a royal prerogative and obligation, actually, to be an absolutist, absolutist monarch and tyrant on behalf of God. So, you know, there were civil wars and he was executed in 6041 and then his head, his head was impaled on, don't ask. So, many monarchs did this. Nibbukadnetser was not a Nazism. He was simply a typical king. I want to finish with something that made me laugh. I have an Instagram follower, Jin Wen Tao. I assume Chinese, I'm not sure. And he wrote to me, Sam, mitochondria are the real master of codependence, first engulfed in a cell and second, they fuse with the cell, with itself. And even more interesting, it's a big head of apoptosis which kills the host cell. So, mitochondria are organelles, they're tiny organs within every cell in the human body. And they're separated from the cell. They have their own wall, membrane, firewall. Actually, mitochondria are alien life forms. I mean, they are earth, they're terrestrial, but they don't belong to the human body. They're another organism, they're another animal. And they got trapped when the first human cells were created, or more precisely the first multicellular organisms were created, they got trapped inside the cells. And rather than trying to extricate themselves and run away, they decided to stay within the cell, within the shared fantasy. And they decided to collaborate with the cell in something called symbiosis. So they're inside the cell, they're totally dependent on the cell, they're totally separated from the cell. They're clearly a different organism. They sometimes kill the cell, they get really pissed off. They have a different DNA, not like your DNA. In every cell, in your body, you have a mitochondrion who has a different, a DNA different to yours. Can you imagine this, you're a huge zoo in almost every cell. So they have different DNA, they're an alien life form, and they collaborate. So they're really, really in some ways co-dependent. And Gene Ventau says it is always from the first beginning, from the very beginning engulfed by an extra membrane from the host cell. And I was thinking, humans have hypochondriasis. Mitochondria probably have mitochondriasis. Mitochondria is co-dependence within a shared fantasy that we call a cell. A beautiful way to wrap up this video. Thank you, Gene Ventau.